A review of The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell

I read about The Kindly Ones in a review in NYRB (which I strongly recommend everyone to peruse regularly (as a close friend recently asked, "how have I lived without this?" after receiving the first issues of her subscription, to which I glibly responded, "in ignorance")), but I cannot say now what in particular it was in the description there that made me so interested in the book. But I was clearly hooked on some level and wanted to buy it, but then only the cloth edition was available and I kept asking myself if I would actually read all of it (not that this has stopped me in the past, mind you) ... and then Y bought it for me while she was buying pregnancy books.

Les Bienveillantes records the life of Maximilien Aue, a young man in his 20s, who is an SS officer during the second World War. The narrative follows the years 1941 to 1944 mostly, although there are snippets from earlier periods of his life, and the beginning of the novel finds our narrator writing to us from contemporary France, having lived a post-war life as an innocuous French burgher.

His address to us is inspiring, and offensive, and quite conscious thereof:

Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you'll retort, and I don't want to know.

This is the apologia of a former SS officer, in the sense of the Socratic contribution to this form, namely, not as an actually apology or even confession insofar as those terms imply guilt, perhaps even remorse, but merely as a retelling of how it happened. It is not exculpatory, although I found myself frequently wanting, at least at first, to somehow acquit this individual of his guilt.

A brief excursus: I feel in this respect a need to confess myself, in part, because I suspect my reactions to this novel may be quite different from others. Prima facie, this may appear merely in the fact that I wanted desperately to read this quite graphic account of an SS officer's life during the war. I think that there is something simultaneously fascinating and horrifying about the Nazis, very much like the scene of an accident from which one cannot look away. I wrote my senior thesis on the novels of Jean Genet, with whom I fell in love upon reading The Thief's Journal. The source of my attraction was always the radical, incongruous transvaluation of values. I am a PK, and have been seeking confirmation of the moral values I naively accepted as a child, and when I did not receive it, I sought the opposite. For these reasons, I find my limit experience in films like Audition (1999) and Funny Games (1997), to which I am drawn as if this is somehow something unquestionably real (but I never finished watching the first, and the second I doubt if I'll ever be able to watch again).

I had to shut the book on reading the description of the protagonist's reluctant participation in the Babi Yar massacre. That is actually more or less where we begin with our narrator, once he allows himself to return to the past. Namely, the movement of the German Army forward into the Ukraine during 1941, when their military might seemed insuperable. The narrator is part of an Einsatzgruppe, a paramilitary death squad. The SS, we learn from Aue, is as its name intends, a security attaché, which is preparing the conquered lands for the Lebensraum--for the emigration of Germans into these lands and the growth of the Third Reich. I guess I had never appreciated the distinction of the Wehrmacht (the army) from the Nazis. I knew that the NSDAP was a political party and that there were others although the former assumed power in the 1933. Yet I suppose I always thought when you were talking about the Nazis you meant Germans during the war. But this is inaccurate, insofar as members of the Wehrmacht were not necessarily Nazis, and the active Nazis during the war were members of the SD and the SS, and when we speak of war crimes we primarily mean the actions of the latter (although obviously there were many exceptions to this). (And so now I wonder if in the film Inglorious Basterds, Brad Pitt's character was seeking the scalps of any Germans or specifically Nazis, and if he appreciated the difference between.)

Einsatzgruppen purged the conquered lands of threats to Nazi party and the Third Reich. Mostly this meant Jews, insofar as they were supposedly closet Bolsheviks or had such leanings. Their duplicitous nature (!) was the cause of this. I won't go into this. But Aue is particularly interesting in that his office was to determine, by the assistance of sociologists and historians and linguists, who were Jews and therefore needed to be exterminated. Aue is an intellectual and has a doctorate in law, and therefore is capable of this kind of labor. Again, I hadn't appreciated the delicacy of this kind of task, namely that because of the logistic challenges of killing thousands of people (at a time), it was important to determine who were actual threats and who were not. Aue befriends other intellectuals who are dubious of the basis of the race studies, but is himself largely convinced, not so much by the veracity of race studies but by the allure and mission of the Third Reich and the Führer in particular. He is a believer. In the latter parts of the book he takes on the study of the workers in the concentration camps and his research demonstrates the divisive, contradictory impulses of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews and yet the necessity of the latter (to be kept in good condition) as military-industrial labor. In this context, Aue advocates better conditions for the Jews and comes to despise the Endlösung.

Aue's political convictions, perhaps we are to speculate, come out of his own Orestian anger. Like Orestes, he holds his mother responsible for his father's disappearance. He desires the restoration of the fatherland. His mother's guilt is unlikely, but this does not matter. She also provokes his contempt insofar as she interrupts the romance between Aue and his sister Una. This relationship is slowly but surely revealed as the most important psychological and emotional event of Aue's life. That romance lasts only during their childhood and early adolescent years. Their mother separates them, sending them to different boarding schools, but they declare their love and faith. Aue keeps it and plans to without end. Una marries an impotent composer and forever wounds Aue. But the images of that relationship seems to subconsciously fuel Aue's homosexual encounters.

The book ends as Berlin falls, but with Aue we have seen Stalingrad and the Ukrainian campaign, we have visited the concentration and the death camps, we have been audience during meetings of SS officers deciding the fates of thousands. We see in vivid detail the horrors of war. Less the sometimes heroic actions of soldiers and troops in battle than the lives of the anonymous peoples who suffer the wake of those military operations. The wake is arguably the worst part, the part that will keep us awake and not allow us to forget. In military operations we at least see an apparently logical movement, destroying participants in battle and the resources that assist them. But the wake, which Littell best represents by the conquest of the Russians across the West into Germany, is the lawlessness that haunts military action.

At the beginning of the book Aue is part of an Einsatzgruppe amongst the most repugnant human beings: violent, bile-filled men thoughtlessly killing innocent people. It is remarkable how the law that allows them to kill these (for the security of the fatherland) protects the members of the SS and Wehrmacht from each other. By the end of the book we see that law break down, although primarily in the Russians who do not countenance the self-deception that war is limited to combatants and who rape and slaughter those in their path.

Humans killing other humans, pointlessly. It is so sickening, but persistent, in this book that it loses dramatic effect. Near the final pages Littell ingeniously employs agents who recapture that horror. As Aue struggles through a crumbling Berlin, still avoiding the Erinyes that plague him, he enter Tiergarten--the zoo. No limit is to be found here.

I entered a half-destroyed building: in a large cage, an immense black gorilla was sitting, dead, a bayonet stuck in its chest. A river of black blood flowed between the bars and mingled with the pools of water. This gorilla looked surprised, astonished; its wrinkled face, its open eyes, its enormous hands, seemed frighteningly human to me ...

As a pet owner, perhaps, this image was worst than anything else I had read. And I had read passages about the snapping bones of dead bodies under foot. But of course, this passage isn't merely about animals and especially not of domestic animals. ... For me, the point is that humans are guilty, existentially, but animals are not, cannot be. So much so that humans are stripped of their "humanity", and only our anthropological cousins can retain it. To understand the banality of the horror of war we must see it in the face of someone or something who is actually human, or deserving of the rights which we deny ourselves.

The Kindly Ones is an exceptional work of historical fiction. I suspect it will be required reading in the future for anyone studying the second world war or the Nazi military campaigns. It overcomes and silences the shallow caricatures of the latter that history has necessarily produced and puts something worse, but more lifelike, in its place. This novel is also an exceptional literary work that I believe will endure. It is repeatedly insightful and honest, confronting the most important moral questions without superficial treatment or resolution. It is beautiful in its persistence in witnessing what is ugliest about human being and our history. I don't know if I think everyone should read it. Rather, I think there are plenty of people who should not--mainly, those who cannot swallow bitter pills (Christians, Republicans, etc.), who prefer illusions. On the other hand, if you are disposed to actually know something, you should read this book.

3-Minute Fiction: Digging Holes

The earth came out of the ground, but it wouldn’t return. There just wasn’t enough room for the earth to fit back in the ground, what with the antique desk in there.
That was the third day.

The first day began after he left for the airport. She already had some notion where it would go. Behind their cozy home a couple of lovely acres stretched, covered with a thick fur of grass. How much time and money had been spent to aerate the soil and generously nourish that yard with water and fertilizer? The yard was the first investment they agreed upon.
In the weeks before his trip, she mentioned two or three times the idea of creating a garden. She said this a couple of times, at the end or beginning of a conversation such that it would be lost beside these matters. It was a lateral remark, perfectly poised to insinuate itself yet remain in the background of daily life. She had to plant the idea.
The first day she carefully removed a patch of topsoil, large enough both for the plot where she would dig as well as the space across which she would drag the desk and then lower it into the hole. She planned to leave no trace of her work; the surface had to be preserved.

The second day she cleaned out the desk, putting its contents in a box. Everything was set aside, except for those nasty pages she found behind a practically hidden panel near the foot of the desk, the day that the desk lamp shorted after she pressed the on/off button and she climbed beneath that desk to unplug it and then saw it. That was two months ago. During those two months she read all of those handwritten pages. And she began writing a similar apologia. The task consumed her, her state of mind oscillating between rage and erotic provocation. It was complete the day before his flight, an elaborate narrative constructed out of every insipid detail that could be coaxed from her memories. She clung tightly to him that night in bed, her pages warming the floor beneath their bed. The next day he left for the airport.
She took her apologia, bound it and replaced it behind the hidden panel at the foot of the desk. She dragged the desk, on its top, across the yard on a tarp, quickly, so as not to disturb the grass too much. It flipped over onto its feet as it fell into the hole. It sat a little more than a foot beneath the surface. Then she tried to replace the earth.

The third day she had to replace the grassy surface, somehow such that no trace would remain and that within a week or so the grass roots would reach back into the ground. But more than a wheelbarrow’s load of dirt remained, that would not fit back into the ground. After replacing the grass (and watering it), she pushed the wheelbarrow to the edge of the yard, around the perimeter slowly, no space being quite right.
He would fly back tomorrow. She would say she’d sold that ugly, antique desk. He would be mad, but …
And then she realized, she would simply leave the full wheelbarrow in the middle of the yard. Except for the handful she put into a bowl and placed underneath their bed.
Next month, before she left to visit her mother, she would tell him to dig out the area she had staked out. His shovel would strike the desk, revealing her trick.

Red Riding: 1974, 1980

"Red Riding" is a series of films, 1974, 1980, and 1983, which are based on a quartet of books by the British author David Peace. I saw the first two of these three films last night at the IFC Center at West 4th and 6th Ave.

I'd been prepared for these movies by reading the piece on them in the New York Times, which made me want to see them, although in retrospect I wonder why. Perhaps it was because of the photograph ran with the story, a still from the first film, which presents the young journalist, who is investigating the abductions of three girls, which the narrative of that film largely follows. More likely, it was the promise of blood and gore, the strangely seductive dream of human bodies rendered un-life-like. In my defense, the first paragraph describes horror non-sex-centric. As if that is possible.

My conscience is slightly assuaged by the knowledge that two of my friends who are paragons of feminist virtue both vigorously consumed 2066, whose most horrifying elements described dryly the murders of more than a hundred Mexican women. Thus, it is not violence porn that drives me (I couldn't even finish that part of the book!), right?

Ah, ethical motives.

Anyway, it's a tough set of movies to see. At this moment I am trying to figure out whether to go and the see the last film tonight or to rent it on Netflix.

It's not because of the story of the abductions, which is only part of the first film and is mostly a provocation for the narrative, but about which the narrative actually doesn't concern. Similarly with the second, which is roughly based on the Yorkshire Ripper killings during the 1980s. In fact, both films are about investigating murders and the vicissitudes of administrative power. In 2066, the subject matter is the same. Bolaño pushes the narrative to follow a few police officers and other related figures finding bodies of women, so that the time the precipitates these victims to their final moments is unaccounted for.

This, it seems to me, is the attractive force in every criminal story. The vestiges of some unthinkable occurrence are found. Vision partially reconstructs how the pieces may have fallen into this order, but always lacks the comprehension that would complete it. What is remarkable about the murder scene is what is missing and yet what is present. The murder scene is, ironically, alive. It bears its own identity and secret; it has a personality, but is wholly mute. I suspect that before the televisual, murder scenes were fairly uninteresting. I say this because they are spectacles par excellence.

For this reason, the justice the murder receives in a trial court is the best possible resolution. By this I do not mean that conventional justice is perfect, but that it is necessarily inadequate. The contemporary trial courtroom tends to lack windows and that is always completely appropriate (I know this grace à "Nightline", etc. The courtroom must be cut off from any natural affects (sunlight, for example) that might allow it to correspond to the needs of human life. In the courtroom the narrative is slowly constructed, in pieces, through an almost orchestral presentation. Each performance is unique and inimitable. And the judge and jury are asked to maintain attention and concern through this performance and then to give judgment. But the judgment is a single, hollow word that quickly passes into eternity.

And words are never equal to the event that has occurred. Yet their inadequacy is a perfect response to the silent haunting of the murder scene.

P.S. This is not what "Red Riding" is about.

Atheism and Hetero-theism

In Plato’s Apology, one of the charges against Socrates is that he preaches about different gods than those of the city, and in this respect doesn’t believe in God and is impious. During his defense, he points out that if he believes and teaches certain divinities, but not those of the city, than he can’t be said to be an atheist.

This episode was interesting to me, in part, because I encountered the same confusion when Spinoza is called an atheist during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. For it seemed so strange to me that one could be an atheist and yet at the same time so clearly and unequivocally speak repeatedly of God, even if it were “sive Natura”. Still, today, when philosophers write about Spinoza’s pantheism, this is immediately identified with a certain atheism. My own position on Spinoza’s pantheism and atheism I will here defer until another time.

But there is a certain necessary slippage in speaking of what I might call “hetero-theism” and its indistinction from “atheism.” The reason is this. If we are theists, then we must deny the existence of gods other than our own. Thus, all those whose gods are unlike ours are necessarily pagans, atheists. Whereas, were we to admit the existence of other gods, then we would be admitting doubt about the singular nature of our god. Thus, the hetero-theist shall always be an atheist.

Quickly: On a line of poetry, vaguely recalled, by Robert Hass

It goes:

Language is a moral cloud-chamber, through which the world passes, emerging charged with desire.

I love that line. It is lovely, perhaps for its imagery. I imagine that shiny earth passing into a mist, within staticky exchanges of electricity go back and forth. The earth comes out of the cloud, and the remaining films of the cloud pull away.

But what does Hass mean my "moral" cloud-chamber (and why do I insist on hyphenating it? and I do)? I like to think that it is an image meant to correct the notion of morality as something silent, like two orbs flitting through space, self-same and immutable. Whereas good and evil are always objects of desire--and repulsion. And the desire is not there by accident, but makes good and evil into what they are. The good is always an object of desire ... and the evil is always an object of desire.

And mediocrity is the neutralizing cloth that kills all life (and desire).

Quickly: The Myth of Equality and Plato's Republic

Perhaps this will be the format for a number of soon-to-be blog posts, but since time is short, they will take the form of "quickly."

Every now and again Y and I see children and I comment on their aptitude and say, oh, he's part of the bronze cast, or she's silver, recalling the "myth of the metals" described at the end of Book 3 of Plato's Republic. As you shall remember, according to the myth of the metals, individuals in the community are differentiated in their education, at birth, based on the metal in their soul. Should you have gold, you shall be trained to be a guardian; silver, an auxiliary; and bronze, a craftsperson. I think this is a funny joke, but Y mentioned the other day that it made her a bit anxious.

I explained to her that Socrates proposed this myth in order to best organize the city that he and his interlocutors are describing. In other words, it is not that Socrates necessarily thinks that there is such a differentiation of individuals according to metal (or blood), but that there needs to be in order to train people properly, create the just regime, etc. As well, I mentioned, the consequence of this myth is that each occupation is treated and valued for herself insofar as they fulfill their occupation, not in relation to other occupations. Namely, that the craftsperson is judged as a craftsperson and not as a guardian. I summarized, drawing from my lectures, that this is the myth of difference.

In my lectures I counterpose this to our own myth of equality. Namely, that all people are equally capable of doing anything, via bootstraps or saving their pennies or education or whatnot. Yet it seems to me, and I didn't realize this until the conversation with Y, that the myth of equality has the unforeseen and unintended consequence of devaluing the different occupations of others. Instead, it treats only the highest, most lucrative, most powerful, occupations as those worthy of esteem. Thus, the myth of equality has the unintended consequence of making all except those who have "succeeded"--which by nature must be a limited number--failures.

How to Speak about the Affective Qualities of Film

Having just spent more than two hours watching "In the Valley of Elah" (2007), there are many things that I feel. The movie is about the story of a father trying to determine what has happened to his son, who is discovered dead shortly after arriving back from a tour of duty in Iraq. Because of the grief presented in the film, I find myself touched by this grief. I am very sad because of the loss of the main character, Hank Deerfield, played by Tommy Lee Jones. We quickly learn, in the first half-hour of the film, that he had also lost another son some ten years earlier. So now he and his wife have lost both of their children.

But the grief for the loss of a son is one thing, yet this narrative is more complex. It happens that the son was killed by one of his army buddies and that there is no good explanation for why the killing occurred. Instead, we are presented with the conditions that made the killing possible. Namely, the return of these young men from a tour of duty in land where there are no marks of achievement or signs of meaning in their actions. The son, we learn, was involved in the accidental death of a child in Iraq, yet this has nothing to do with the narrative, but to show the fragile mental state of the young man. Thus, our grief is accentuated by the lack of purpose and the moral confusion of the son's killing.

The director of the film frames the movie around two mirror episodes, where Deerfield explains to an immigrant how to hang the national flag. In the first episode, the immigrant has hung it upside down. Deerfield explains that this is a sign of "distress." Thus, he shows the immigrant how to hang it properly, signifying national honor, not distress ... turpitude. At the end of the film, in the second episode, after Deerfield has returned from his trip to uncover the mysterious end of his son's life, he reverses what he has done, hanging the flag for the immigrant upside down, to indicate "distress."

The world that we leave as the movie closes, is one of solitude and sadness and loss. It is a very powerful image, particularly for those who mourn the deaths of soldiers and those who love them, who sometimes fall into their way. The image is clearly also a critique, or better a commentary, on the state of American foreign politics, the conflict in Iraq in which we are entrapped. The film presents no answers and in this regard does not attempt to assuage the affect it provoked.

Is it necessary to identify with Deerfield in order to experience the grief and confusion the film presents? This would be difficult because he is an Army man, former military police, and it was because of his service that his sons both joined the armed forces. Thus, Deerfield has a unique responsibility for the deaths of his sons, because they followed him. Had he led them astray? The viewer is certainly not expected to be able to identify with his character. We feel a sadness and a confusion because we appreciate both Deerfield and another character that assists his search for answers.

Must the affective power be measured by my individual response? I am particularly interested in this topic, because I have read news stories like the one told in this film. I have also learned a little bit about the intense psychological trauma that soldiers suffer and wish that solutions existed to solve their problems. I wonder if they, like the soldiers of other wars, will bear that trauma their entire lives.

Falling into a pattern that is well-wrought by intellectual history preceding me, I am tempted to separate these affective events from the purported "content" of the film. Yet this would be an artificial distinction that would fail to comprehend the film in its breadth. But this then leads to the judgment that the affective qualities of the film cannot be separated from this particular story and its narrative unfolding. Thus, the judgment would not be limited to the individual response, that in this case I felt.

But how do we speak about the affective qualities of a film? We describe the conditions and events that provoke affective reactions. For example, how the moral clarity of Deerfield, which is represented by his well-organized and productive life, slowly devolves, like a man who at first is sitting up straight, but by and by begins to slump. We might remark the power of Jones' face, marked with lines of time and emotion and how they perfectly accept the emotional tasks that he has in presenting Deerfield's character. How he responds to finally hearing the confession of his son's killer, with a blank face that does not register reaction. In point of fact, during the confession the scene is dominated by shots of the killer describing the deed and his relation to the victim. Yet the fact that, at a crucial moment, the killer directs his account to Deerfield, is unmistakeable. The audience watches the killer from Deerfield's perspective and hears the killer apologize to Deerfield, the audience.

Can these affective qualities be put into words and must we separate ourselves from them in order to judge the film (is judgment necessary and is our emotional state, upon the completion of the film, that judgment itself)?